Do You Use uTorrent? Then Be The Master Of Your Preferences

uTorrent is by far the most widely used BitTorrent client, and for very good reason. uTorrent is very small, very fast, and portable. It is packed with every feature you’d need to be a total download manager and this long list of features is complemented by a very configurable list of options and preferences.

In this post, I want to help everyone make sure that they’ve got their uTorrent client tweaked to their liking and to optimal performance. There’s a lot going on under the hood and uTorrent is in that elite class of software that many of us use every other day. Such software should be tweaked and played with until you’ve got it running just the way you like it.

So start up your client and go into the Preferences window, underneath the Options menu.

General

Most of you are probably familiar with tweaking this tab.

One suggestion I will make is that you uncheck the Check association on startup option. If you don’t use other download managers, it shouldn’t be necessary. It can also slightly speed up client start time.

Under the When Downloading table, I also recommend that you check Prevent standby if there are active torrents, especially if you like to download overnight. Doing so will keep your computer from going on standby, thus powering down your wireless card or other network interface and disconnecting you from the Internet.

Directories

If you, like me, store your downloads on an external drive then this is a pretty important section of the preferences.

Although you can see I’m not doing it in this screenshot, many would recommend that you store new downloads on your local drive and then move completed downloads to your external drive. Doing so will be less stressful on the external drive, as USB devices don’t have the same read and write capabilities as your internal drive.

The Automatically load torrents from setting is a good way to allow your uTorrent installation to be truly “portable” with an external drive, as you can seed and download from anywhere as long as you store your torrent files on that drive.

Bandwidth

This is a very important tab. Disregard my pathetic speed limits here, if you will.

My strongest suggestion is that you get a feel for your maximum upload and download rates through Speedtest and set your limitations accordingly. We all know how crazy ISPs are about torrent traffic, so I’d really always recommend throttling your upload and download speeds to something responsible.

The Maximum upload rate and Maximum download rate are global settings, not per torrent. They are in kB/sec. Many of you are on connections where you’re more familiar with megabytes, and there are 1024 kB in 1 MB.

The Number of Connections table also has very important numbers. Higher numbers here could actually cause your uTorrent client to require more CPU usage. Set them as you see fit.

Transfer Cap

I just mentioned those crazy, torrent-hating ISPs. If your ISP forces a monthly cap on your download and upload, you absolutely need to use this. It’s very self-explanatory and allows you to set limits at each level.

Scheduler

The scheduler is a very cool and thoughtful feature that a lot of you should be able to appreciate.

If you live with others and share a connection, don’t be that guy using up all of the bandwidth. Set up your scheduler to limit upload and download speeds during peak or home hours. Let your downloads go unthrottled overnight or when everyone is at work. Clicking on squares in the grid will allow you to change their color, and function, respective to the hour in the chart.

In the screenshot, I am throttling my speeds from 7 PM to midnight.

While I’ve covered a lot here, there are plenty more preferences that you need to look over yourself. The UI Settings tab is a good example. Set up your uTorrent so that it’s an enjoyable, smooth downloading experience, not a chore. Take five minutes out of your day to do this and it could improve your Internet and system performance in the future.

Make sure you check out our uTorrent Tips & Tricks guide, too! Let me know what you think of uTorrent and these tips in our comments. Maybe you have some tips of your own?

Phúc Ng?c

rshewmaker

July 31, 2012

Utorrent has been my program of choice for a few years now. I know this isn’t probably the place for a question but… I can’t figure why download links only work with chrome and not IE 9 any longer. I know some setting (cookies maybe) in the one of the browsers has changed. I just don’t know which it is. Any feedback would be great.

Nitai Leffler

Muhammad Ahmad

Va Du

July 31, 2012

Still the best and I don’t even use the latest version. That’s saying something. The scheduler is great when I want to use it during sleep since I can’t go max speed during the day when everyone else in my house uses it.

Phill Johnson

Phill Johnson

Darryl Park

July 31, 2012

I have a D-Link DNS-323 NAS and it has a built in torrent client. If I take the same torrent file and plug it into utorrent or transmission on my mac, then also that torrent file on the DNS-323, I get huge throughput on the DNS-323. Most times it pushes 1Mb/sec where the torrent apps on the mac rarely come close to half that. maybe it’s a settings thing. I’ll have to test out your suggestions in the article but needless to say, I always use the DNS-323 to grab torrents.

Salman Abdullah

July 31, 2012

You didn’t explain an advance preferences then how to become the master of preferences

Diva O’Doom

August 13, 2012

I agree. This is a pretty vanilla article. None of the settings are explained. “Set as you see fit” is not helpful at all. There are many other tutorials with much better information than this one. YouTube has videos with much more thorough instructions.

Jay Iyer

July 31, 2012

I’ve used utorrent a lot and I completely agree with what has been written in this post. It is one of the best available torrent clients (possibly the best one even). Although, I am not sure I’ve used the scheduler / transfer cap functionalities before. I’ve always used an external scheduler to start/stop utorrent and my network when I used to be on a bandwidth/download cap every month. Can someone please explain if this is a new feature in a latest version? (to be honest, I have not used utorrent for quite a long time – about a year or more now).

Edward Bellair

Dany Bouffard

Nathan Kaufman

July 31, 2012

You can point the ‘open torrent files from …’ and ‘move completed downloads to …’ both to different files in your dropbox in order to make use of a surrogate download computer (that YOU own, of course ….) or just to queue up a download from work or the road.

sabih

Pax

In the [Directories] section you should consider typing in directory names like this:

.\downloads
.\torrents

Note that I have not indicated a drive letter. This help make the entire app portable. Basically, you can move the entire directory structure from machine to external drive to another machine.

You will also need to create an empty file called settings.dat in the same folder so that settings will be written there instead of the registry. You should do this when you first download the executable. The empty settings.dat insures full portability.

Muhannad Agha

Manide

August 1, 2012

I was advised to set TRUE value for bt.prio_first_last_piece item (Advanced preferences). This gives higher priority to the first and last piece so that the file could be previewed. See the screenshot for more – if necessary: http://i.minus.com/iwRf0bnY9W34N.png

Ahmed Khalil

Angus Kong

Dave Hill

September 16, 2012

I run Utorrent on an XP machine and my top tip would be CTRL+ALT+DEL to open task manager – close any unwanted apps down and then right click on utorrent , set priority to high or real time and you will almost certainly see an increase in speed. Also within utorrent itself click the files tab – you can right click on any or all of the files in any torrent and skip tham or change their priority. also right click on the torrents in the top pane and you can set the bandwidth available to them and update the tracker they use – all good for speeding things up

Alex Downs

David Fielder

October 16, 2012

I hate how everyone assumes since I have utorrent on my mac that I am pirating stuff. I like using it to download ISO that my school offers, but they block the torrents so that you have to use direct download and it takes forever.